Mid-Year Update

Mid-Year Update

Since our 2025 Annual Gathering, we have been focused on the conviction that God has been our help in ages past and that he will continue to be our hope for years to come. Above all else, this is a confession of faith because the signs of God’s help and the reasons for hope are not always apparent to us. In fact, sometimes they are nowhere to be found.

My assignment for this month’s e-newsletter was to provide a mid-year update. That is often the type of article in which I might talk about big events so far this year, report on our financial situation, let you know how many new churches we have received, and what new initiatives have taken shape. These things would then provide us with some sort of basis for the claim that God has been our help and continues to be our hope.

In the role I have now, I think more about statistics and data than I ever have in my life. I try to interpret giving patterns. I try to understand attendance figures. I try to predict growth or decline. I try to anticipate needs based on the information available to us. And when I don’t have the information I need, I try to figure out ways to get it, so that I can report to you (and the Board of Trustees) that everything is moving in the right direction. All signs point to success.

But I think the theology of the cross calls us to something different. It calls us to trust in God’s presence, in God’s faithfulness, no matter what the numbers are showing us, and no matter what darkness swirls around us and within us. And that’s no easy thing.

Even as I write those words, I want to undermine them by assuring you that the finances are in good shape and the association continues to grow. I want to point to tangible evidence of God’s faithfulness to us, and then maybe flip that around and suggest that these blessings are actually signs of our faithfulness to him. And soon, the numbers replace faith. The numbers become the object of our deepest fear, love, and trust. Where the numbers are good, we celebrate our achievement. Where they are bad, we lament our failure and fear the future. But God’s arithmetic is quite a bit different than ours.

God is our help and our hope when our congregation is in the midst of an exciting building project and when our beloved building is reduced to ashes. He is our help and our hope when we don’t have enough rooms for all of the Sunday School kids and when we are trying to figure out if we should close the doors for good. He is our help and our hope when there is money in the bank and when every council meeting includes a vote on which bills to pay. This is a confession of faith, not a recitation of statistics.

The mid-year update is that God continues to be faithful to his sinful people, as he always has been. God continues to enter into our celebrations and our sorrows. God’s mercy endures for the likes of you and me, stripping away all that makes for death and giving us, instead, his life.

Some of our congregations are growing. Some are declining. Some budgets are balanced. Some are not. Some are celebrating the arrival of their new pastor. Some continue to wait. Some are joining LCMC with a sense of renewed purpose. Some are deeply discouraged by a long decline. Whatever our particular circumstances, there is one constant: God in Jesus Christ is faithful and he is holding his people close. He will never let go. He is our hope for years to come, for ALL the years to come.

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Photo: Christian Gries of St. James Lutheran Church (Greenfield, IN). "This scene greeted me on the morning of March 15, 2022 as I arrived at the church for morning Bible study. 'I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a covenant between me and the earth.' – Genesis 9:13."

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